This invention relates to systems and methods for the high throughput screening and identification of fatty acid composition signatures in biological materials such as seeds.
Oil seeds are valuable crops with many nutritional and industrial uses due to their unique chemical composition. Accordingly, seed breeders are continually trying to develop varieties of oil seeds to maximize oil seed yield and/or production. As such, grain handlers and seed breeders must be able to distinguish an oil seed from a regular seed to make important decisions in a grain handling situation or in a seed breeding operation. Such decisions have traditionally been based on statistical sampling of a population of seeds because determining the fatty acid characteristics of a population of seeds has been laborious and time consuming. However, statistical sampling necessarily allows some seeds without the desirable trait to remain in the population, and also can inadvertently exclude some seeds from the desired population.
Thus, there is a need for high throughput screening systems and methods for use in the identity testing of oil seeds.